Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Culture does not make people. People make culture.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They'll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair. Ugwu's aunty said this in a low voice as they walked on the path. "But he is a good man," she added. "And as long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day."

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Because I am female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There are people... who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.... The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe.... I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
He did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts—it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved—but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie